


With Your Feet In The Air And Your Head On The Ground

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-02
Updated: 2011-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:12:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Beloved," he breathes out, a sigh, a song, a motherfucking prayer, "Gamzee. Gamzee, you will have me as your truest love for as long as you desire me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Your Feet In The Air And Your Head On The Ground

**Author's Note:**

> This work is also illustrated by the very amazing left-right, who's tumblr is here: http://left--right.tumblr.com/

You're seven sweeps old and you've been keeping an eye on your best motherfucking friend Equius for at least a sweep or two now, like ever since you were all supposed to be on teams in your best motherfucking friend's Karkat's weird game-- shit, maybe more than that-- and even though none of you ever got around to playing that wicked thing you all kept in touch and it's not like a pale thing or anything like that you've got going on with this here horsebrother, you've got your best bull bro and _he's_ got that awesome cat chica of his to really keep him mellowed and you're not the kind of motherfucker to go horning in on a kitty's territory. That bitch is fierce, and hella cute besides.

But so there's this one time when you're seven or maybe eight or six and half, you don't know, whatever, right? No, you're seven and it just...

It's like your head just... the situation is pretty much that it hurts, more, lately, now. You think, anyway. You don't know, what the motherfuck do you even know? But there's a drifting ache inside you that never really goes away, you just forget to think about how it hurts most of the time only the more sweeps you're racking up the harder it is to forget what you're forgetting and when you're with Equius chilling him down you're kept pretty busy. It's not like you've got irons in the fire or anything uptight like that but that blueblooded brother of yours just runs so hot and it could be nice, sometimes, to feel warm.

So it's just that your head is just so empty sometimes and inside, on the inside of you, there's this drifting thing, that's all, this fucking drifting thing all up in your head business that hurts you so _bad_ and one day when you're over at your best bull's place keeping him on the straight and mellow while his legs get refitted Equius gets all just a little too salty up in your bro's business, and okay, you're an ice-chill kind of guy but there's a line and it's drawn in the color of oH HeLl No YoU _dIdN't._

Equius lies there on the ground like one a his broken robots, his eyes so perfectly beautifully round and the shape of your hand coming up like a flower on his cheek, blue as a motherfucking miracle, and the inside of your head is so beautifully quiet.

"Highb100d," he breathes, and "uMM, gAMZ," Tavros whimpers and you: you nod.

YeAh, you think, mOtHeRfuCkInG sUre.

There's a line, and it's drawn in the warmth of your hand and the color of his blood and the way all that empty shit in your head rolls over and whispers _oh yes this please, MORE._ If you could draw a line that sweet and motherfucking _perfect_ in this one bright instant of motion, what else could you draw?

Equius's sharp, heavy breaths are loud as the world, in and out, in and out, loud as the moons grinding their way through the sky. He doesn't get up.

"HoW'rE ThE LeGs, BrO?" you ask your main motherfucking moirail, and he stammers and lets you off the fucking hook, he's gonna be just fine.

You lean down and catch a fistful of your horsebrother's hair, clean and slick and sweet as sopor through your fingers, right as a fine, fine joke told just from him to you and so shit, if he's got a moirail and you've got a moirail then the pair of you'd just have to fill--

He trembles, underneath your hand, and you find yourself tasting your own paint as you lick your lips. _YeS_ , you think. _YeS, yEs, YeS._

"My PlAcE," you say, and he nods.

You captchalogue the both of you, and unpack yourself in a blaze of miracles redblueorangebright as stars, tumbling across your floor in a cacophony of honks and you have really got to get organized like your fiercest fine sister Kanaya is always on you about and Equius lies like an unloved doll in the middle of it, crumpled and shaking in awe.

"HaAaAaA, yEaH," you realize, rubbing awkwardly at your neck, "ItS kInD oF a RuSh, MaN, i DuNnO rIgHt?"

"Miracles," Equius murmurs, blinking all hazylike at your ceiling.

"RiGhT oN, mY mOtHeRfUcKeR," you agree, and kneel down by him. He curls up around your hand on his stomach, trembling like anything.

"HoW," you say as tactfully as you can which you don't know how tactful that actually amounts to being, but you hope you're somewhere along the way of tactness because this is kind of a motherfucking touchy subject with fucking near everyone, "hOw Do YoU fEeL aBoUt PaILs, MaN?"

Equius opens his mouth, those snaggly motherfucker teeth all winking at you higgledypiggledy, half-growing-back-in and half-busting-the-fuck-back-out and then he closes his mouth like he changed his mind, and then he sits up and kinda half bows at you, all grave like he's the gravest motherfucker to have ever been all serious at a guy before.

"I would be honored to receive any corner of your attention that you might see fit to bestow upon me, Highb100d," he says, beads of sweat glittering crystal at his temples. He says, "I am and have always been yours to r001."

"HaHa, RiGhT tHeN," you say, pretty fucking relieved, "i FuCkInG rUlE yOu Up tO cHiLlAxE tHe FuCk OuT, mOtHeRfUcKeR, aNd WaX sOmE sErIoUsLy FrOsTy rEd Up In ThIs BuSiNeSs."

Equius breathes out like he's been waiting all his life to be told that which is pretty much the best trick ever because you really like telling people what they want to hear, and he scoots closer and touches your face, so gently, reverent as all anyone has ever done at you. His hands are rough and hard as warm stones as they drag across your skin and then he brings your lips together

and its just

sometimes your head feels so motherfucking _empty._

After the pail has been washed out and put away he comes back and kneels, gingerly, by your side. His hands hover over your face, your chest, and you don't know if he wants you to roll over or sit up or what, and you want...

Everything is so quiet, and it makes you want to tear the whole world to pieces because it is all just so motherfucking beautiful, the miracle empty quiet and when there's so much of it there's nothing much of you and you and you and--

"i want to tear apart the whole world," you say, quietlike, that thing inside you made out of all the colors of careful nothingness roiling up and up and out.

"What?" your matesprit says.

"NoThInG, mAn," you say, because it's nothing, the thought snicker-snaking out and away into the void, "LiE DoWn HeRe WiTh A bRoThEr, WoUlD yA?"

He does, hard and rough and heavy as mountains as he gingerly rests his head on your chest, warm as an iron in the fire.

"You are exquisite," he says, sleepily, drifting off and away somewhere none of any of you can follow each other. Everyone is alone behind their eyes, is all, isn't it?

Isn't it?

"It'S nOtHiNg," you say, and you pet his hair as he goes.

You stare at your ceiling and do not dream, because you're Gamzee Makara, and you're seven and a half sweeps old. You're going to tear down the whole motherfucking universe, the ceiling whispers down to you, and

aNd

it's going to be

 _EXQUISITE._

*

You're eight sweeps old and having a big beach wriggling bash for your spiderbitch homegirl Vriska, you and Tav and Eridan and Nepekitty and Vris's on-again-off-again kismesis Eridan who's also kinda Tavros's too, turnwise like-- kinky motherfucking shit, you guess, but Vriska's gotten her head on straighter as the pack of you all have grown sunwards and it makes them all hatehappy and so who are you to complain? nobody, you guess-- and it's a big sandy fucking FLARP rumpus of Gamblignants vs. Skylarks for old time's sake: next sweep you'll all be spacecases, next sweep you'll be adults, but that's as far-off unreal as the stars and for now there's the setting moons painting everything greenpink miracles and the sharp tang of seawater and gunfire and laughter.

And then that utter bitch has to go and hold your boy-- _YOUR BOY_ \-- underwater for just a bit too long and it's all just like, why, girl? why would you have to go aNd DO A THING _LIKE THAT?_

Her head under your club makes a wet low cracking noise, sharp as a gunshot. It feels so good: Tavros sits up, coughing seawater out of his lungs and yoU feEl sO mOThERFUCKING GOOD.

Eridan screams high and sharp with rage and lunges for you, the butt of his gun cracking hard against your head in a way that makes your brain ring like a bell and you snatch it out of his hands, the world swimming around you, you break the motherfucker over your knee like you're going to break his skull and he staggers, as your club gets him across the face, goes to one knee before you. You grab him by one crooked horn and twist, his choked gasp like music, just exactly like motherfucking music.

His royal blood paints such delicate purple spirals in the tide as it drips from his mouth, a blaze of clear cold color and you raise your club one more time--

Equius is there, his strong arms around you and all inconveniently pinning your own arms to your side, his hands prying the club out of yours in a way that really actually fucking hurts, all saying "No, no, no, my liege, my lord, my love, you can't, his b100d--"

"let me go, babe," you warn him, "LET ME MOTHERFUCKING GO, MOTHERFUCKER," you warn him and he shakes and prickles up against you with sweat and seaspray and he digs his head into your shoulder and sobs low in his throat.

"Take her and run," he tells Eridan, "I can't hold him for long."

Eridan nods, his face gone ashy pale, and grabs up Vriska's limp brokendoll body. In a flash of white and spattered blue he's got that skyhorse of his to the rescue and streaks away, off into the gathering night where you can't get him. You shake Equius off like a bad dream and wade after them through the water, roaring, the skein of nothing in your head like the ragehonk of a thousand billion endless dark miracles, a twilight of destruction all thundered through with pain and holy malice.

The darkandwhite shape of Eridan and _that bitch_ get smaller against the sky, the gathering dawn, smaller smaller _gone_. You have nothing but seawater in your hands, under your club, bitter and empty and frothing up around your shoulders, your neck. A wave hits you in the face and bowls you over into a chilly spinning nothingness that burns at your eyes, at your heart, and you lose yourself to it--

You come back to yourself all sprawled deadlike in the sand as Equius breathes air back into your lungs, his lips warm against yours, his hands pressing bruises into your ribs like constellations. You feel as though you've been scrubbed clean with salt and fire, and even after you're breathing on your own you don't move, don't sit up. Equius huddles beside you, miserable and crying.

"I beg forgiveness," he sobs, clutching at you. "I'm so sorry, highb100d, I'm so--"

"nOthinG tO foRgiVe, mOtHeRfUcKeR," you sigh, your voice a salt-shredded rasp, your heart going bangbangbangBANGBANG against the inside of your skin and beneath that the endless peaceful void that calls and calls and calls for beautiful murder. "NoThInG aT aLl."

[   
  
](http://pics.livejournal.com/roachpatrol/pic/000dcfrp/)

Equius carries you all the way back home because your legs have checked out somewhere along the way, called it quits, and while you're trying to get your face back all up in the paints and suchlike from where the ocean had taken it away he goes and looks up one of your pie recipes and manages to put one together without breaking more than a few plates and your oven, and he promises to fix your oven.

He presents you the warm tin with shaking hands and its all the sweetest thing anyone has done for you in a while cause you know how much he disapproves of you getting your pie on and it's okay, pretty bad as pies go but your main man has more of a thing with robots than cooking and so it's not like you're going to get salty about anyone's hobby preferences because you're not that kind of motherfucker, you know? He says he knows, and goes to fix your oven while you finish the lumpy, underdone pie and contemplate the miracle of your hands, which are really actually like tiny people if you look at them the right way, which is lying down, because everything kindA--

\--kinDa huRTs actUally--

\--and yOu you you don't know why anything would go and do a hurting thing like that, man and so you focus on being nothing. Your hands can take over the job without you, cause you're gone.

"I'm so sorry," someone whispers at one point, and presses a kiss to the outside of your forehead, as soft and sweet as seaglass.

But you're already far and away and gone, gone, gone.

*  
 _  
_You're eight and precisely one half sweeps old and it's almost dawn and you've been drinking all night, Faygo-sweet carbonated sopor filling you up like the stuffing of a doll, blocking out the world in a pulsing haze of sugar and sick bubbles. You stand at the edge of the ocean with the waves washing over your skin, and you try to stay vertical and you throw rocks out at the rim of the sky where it's going white and sometimes you succeed at both of those things at the same time. You're high as a motherfucking cloud, high as the stars, coasting on black syrup and suffocating from the inside outwards.

Salt crusts your face, and smoke crusts your hair, and Equius lies still and watchful up a little ways away from the waterline and your knuckles are cold and numb from their grip on the bottles you've been thirstmurdering and you're eight and one half sweep old and all of everything you know hangs around you like the way the cards of your sylladex flash, bright and and strange and pointless, a joke told in a language no one has ever spoken before just from the rainbow darkness to your aching head.

It hurts so motherfucking _bad_.

You heard the heavy hissing noise of someone jogging towards you through the sand, and you throw the last rock at the ocean-- a miss, it flings itself straight down between your feet-- and turn carefully around. The tide makes the sand beneath your feet slither out and away, and it's hard to keep your head pointed the right way up and your legs the right way down.  
 _  
_Tavros is steaming in the cool seaside air, his chest spangled with sweat and stars and sparks as he skirts around your bonfire. A skinny troll hangs bound and blindfolded across his back, looks to have been bruised to a yellow-blooded pulp in the trip here. Tav must have been running all evening, looks to be. He lives a long way off, long enough that he usually meets you at Equius's craggy hive instead of taking the whole trip through the mountains to your coast.

Equius leans up on his elbows. "This is not a good time, Nitram," he rumbles.

"i-- iT'S, aBOUT, aRADIA," Tavros gasps out, and pulls the troll off his back to sprawl in a pained heap on the sand. Equius makes a rough, shocked noise, and sits straight up.

"WhO?" you have to ask.

" _aRADIA_ ," Tavros snarls, like that clears anything up, breathless and brown-faced with a seriously unchill amount of fury. "nNNGH, VRISKA TOLD ME EVERYTHING, lAST MORNING, aRADIA DIED, bECAUSE HE KILLED HER, aND HE KEPT HER SOUL IN ONE OF HIS, hIS FUCKING MAINFRAMES, lIKE A FIDUSPAWN, oR A SPARE CARD--"

"IIt wa2n't liike that--" the yellowblood mumbles, "II triied two 2ay--"

"sHUT THE FUCK UP," Tav snaps, kicking him across the sand with one shining silver leg.

"Fuck you!" the kid snarls back. He's a wiry little geek with more than a fair share of teeth, patterned in bruise-yellow spots and just this side of berserk. You think maybe you know him, but with your head all as it's being at the moment you can't remember his name. You trip over your soggy pants as you try to remember, and land heavily in the loose sand. Bubbles rise up within you, pop sick and sour high up in your throat.

"bUt WhAt Is EvEn AlL tO bE tHe MaLfUnCtIoN iN tHiS fReSh fUnCtiOn?" you want to know, rolling over a bit, swallowing hard. You feel kinda lost. "WhO's... I mEan, uMmM. FuCk." You can't think so good all up in this particular moment, it's all sand and static everywhere and pouring through your fingers and the pain like thunder and deathmetal drums through your thinkpan.  
 _  
_"sHE AVENGED ME," Tavros rumbles, "SHE WAS MY FRIEND, sHE WAS MY REALLY, rEALLY GOOD FRIEND WHEN WE WERE KIDS, aND, sHE AVENGED MY LEGS FOR ME AND SHE _DIED_ AND ALL THIS TIME _HE'S HAD HER MOTHERFUCKING GHOST TRAPPED ON A MOTHERFUCKING HIVEDISK_ \--"

He kicks the yellowblood again. "yOU GET HER OUT OF YOUR STUPID DECK! yOU GET HER OUT _RIGHT NOW!_ "

"II'm not doiing _2hiit_ for you, nook2taiin!" the guy screams. "IIt'2 all _your_ fault 2he'2 dead iin the fiirst place!"

Tavros makes a wild, animal noise of pure fury, and draws his lance.

"ChIlL, bRo," you say, finally making it back to your feet. The stars flock dizzily around your head like someone else's punchline until Tavros grabs you off your sliding legs and introduces you to a good firm hug and some madsloppy hairsnuffles, and you pet his head a bit and go all up in your most serious motherfucking comfort mode.

"MoThErFuCk, TaV, sHhHh," you tell him, closing your eyes against the world's sick noise, the thousand and one dirty jokes it whispers to you in the dizzy crash of surf and stars and death. "'s ArRiGhT, DoG. YoU gO aN' cRy."

"I can fi% this," Equius says, and you all look over to see him staring out into deep space the way he always get when he's about to introduce some broken piece of the world to a good strict update, Tav's legs or Nep's claws or his battledome. He blinks at the stars, wipes his forehead, and decaptchaloges a sheaf of seriously old blueprints, his handwriting round and childish across the margins.

A robot with the face of a young girl, no more than 6 sweeps old, peers up off the paper.

"yOU, yOU KNEW, tOO?" Tav asks, his voice a betrayed shred of noise, and he clutches at you like he's the motherfucker that needs steadying. You honk breathlessly as your personal space takes a mad blitz out into the negatory-- he doesn't even notice.

Equius looks miserable. "Vriska told me, shortly after events had... come to a conclusion. I thought that perhaps if I were to construct a shell for her... Post-mortem psycotranspiration has been accomplished in a few e%peremental necrolaboratories, so I thought... but she never awoke the shell I had prepared for her soul. I assumed... she'd moved on. Or that there had been something wrong with my plans. Or... myself..."

"sHE WAS MY FRIEND," Tav repeats, sounding not any such time older than 6 sweeps himself, his eyes as reverent as holy flame as they crawl over the old paper.

"She was my first passion," Equius says, staring far and away through the diagrams. "I knew not whether it was love or hate but it set my b100d to righteous flame and I knew that I was truly alive when I beheld a world that could have produced one such as she. Her red b100d was corrosion, perversion, but her every word and deed was e%uisite poetry, grace itself po100ted by long e%ile to mortal flesh..."

"WelL, mOtHeRfUcK," you say, slipping out of Tav's arms and back down to the sand. "wHaT'rE uS bItChEs WaItInG fOr?"

They look at you. You look at them, then the lightening sky, then the ocean, then yourself to make sure you're all put together right. "LeT'S bUiLd tHaT sHiT," you explain, when they still don't seem to be copping any fresh knowledge. "LeT's BrInG tHiS bItCh bAcK."

"But my plans--" Equius protests.

"If _I_ couldn't--" Skinny McLemonsnout on the sand sneers--

"sHuT ThE mOTHERFUCK UP AND PAY SOME MOTHERFUCKING ATTENTION," you advise them.

They shut the motherfuck up and pay some motherfuckng attention.

"YoU'Ve GoT tO lOoK aT iT tUrNwIsE, yOu GeT mE? iF oNe aNd oNe AnD uHhHh... oNe oF yOu cOuLdN't gEt wItH tHe gIg, ThEn wHaT yOuVe gOt AlL uP tO bEiNg Is ToGeThEr uP iN tHaT JaM, coLlAbOrAtIoN-sTyLe. PuT dOwN a TwO-sTeP. HoP oN tHe Us-Bus sHaRpLike, mOtHeRfUcKeRs."

There's a contemplative silence. Equius looks at Tavros and Tavros looks at the plans and you look at your toes, which are kind of like tiny useless fingers all shrunk down and glued to your feet to not do any kind of anything at all but get sand all up in their business. Pretty fucking weird, now that you come to consider it.

"Wow okay, diid we really ju2st get 2schoolfed by Equiiu2'2 pet vegetable?" Lemonsnout asks plaintively. "2omeone 2hoot me now, II'm done."

"SHUT THE MOTHERFUCK UP BEFORE I MOTHERFUCKING MAKE A SANDWICH WITH YOUR MOTHERFUCKING EYEBALLS AND MOTHERFUCKING FEED IT TO YOU, I AM MOTHERFUCKInG SeRIOuS, bRo," you tell him. You don't really have the werewithal to have just all any motherfucker flapping his fangs at you on this particular night.

Equius cracks his knuckles.

Lemonsnout shuts up.

"RiGhT," you say. You snap your fingers vaguely at your matebro, and go to head for home. "GiMmEaNoThEr pIe, mY mOsT eXcElLeNt bItChTiTs, AnD lEt'S gEt ThIs PaRtY sTaRtEd."

Vast curves rise up from the embers of the bonfire like streaks of black paint against the blue-gray sky, like furled wings, like great curled horns--

Equius is there, though, to steady you as you stumble, and presses a tin into your arms.

You spoon a handful of slime into your mouth with sandy fingers, as you slip-slide along in front of your brothers in the burning dawn, and you don't think about what those shapes behind you are supposed to be about.

*

What follows is a perigee of frantic activity, as your friends and family all get their gigs in gear for Aradia 2: Electric Boogaloo. Plans are drawn, bags are packed, shuttles requisitioned, and you and Tav and Nep and Equius and Lemonsnout all go decamp to Aradia's old hive, which is where her soul will be most hip to the happening, you get told.

Lemonsnout turns out actually to have been that new kismesis of Nepeta's and his name has actually been Sollux the whole time and so you do your best to welcome him to the family with a traditional wicked welcome to the family slime-pie and he does the traditional being welcomed to the family thing of not actually eating any of the pie, which is cool and all and he even throws in some mad classic goings-on about how bad they are for your brain and so like, more for you, you guess. You haven't needed your brain in pretty much... ever, you guess. You have people to do that kinda fresh business for you.

"Whatever, fucknut2" he says, and goes back to splicing wires through the sagging hivewalls.  
 _  
_Equius takes over Aradia's main living room and sets the place up as a forge to cast the parts they'll need to assemble. Tavros takes over the task of carrying around whatever Equius wants him to and keeping the fires high and holding tools and such, his face drawn and serious and his metal legs digging gashes out of the soggy rotten floor and sparking off the scattered robot parts when he trips and gets yelled at by your main matesprit.

Without much to contribute to the jam, robotwise, besides volunteering some strictly ill rhythms to keep the gang all chill, you and Nepeta come up with and then assign yourself to the snacks brigade. It doesn't take much to get Aradia's old chow-lair whipped up proper, and hunting down some mad tasty barbeque-beast with your best kittyfriend is always a good time. The grassland around Aradia's hive is flush with grass-rustling prey for the two of you to get your pounce on, and Nepeta's been needing some lessons on the fine motherfucking art of a well-done mincemeat turnover. She's good at the meat, brutalwicked with the mince, not so hot with anything to do with flour and patience, but they're getting there.

The others put things together, take things apart, fight constantly, and come up for some air only when prompted by a slab of pastry to the head. They are some seriously dedicated motherfuckers, and beneath their combined attentions Aradia's body spins itself out of the wreckage like a girlshaped crest of seafoam.

"ShE's PrEtTy," you say, handing Equius some choice skittervermin hotpocket. He only nods distractedly as he shoves it into his mouth, and keeps wielding, his fingers making careful, graceful shapes with the solder and torch. You kinda hang for a second, making sure he's okay, but the light is bright and the sparks strobe and burn and so after a while you retreat back outside to stare at the endless unfamiliar green ocean of grass and feel kinda... lost.

When it comes to your pies Equius is kinda busy so you try and manage your brew yourself, and settle on not nearly as much as to be keeping your head screwed on chillwise but it's hard to keep up with all everything that's happening up in this party if you're too relaxed, and there are too many cranky bros and too much endless rustling grass and rotten spooky hive and important wires to trip on and suchlike to really get a good zoneout going and your head just hurts and hurts and hurts but you can deal with it, you're not going to be the joker who pulls out just when things are getting laid down proper and every time you want to go home you think about that dead girl friend of your very very best friends, getting closer to coming back to you all every night, and you think you're all going to be just fine.

Lemonsnout stops being so tetchy and Equius is smiling again and Tav starts to paint the hive's walls in his spare time, clean some shit up, and your head only really bugs you when you're not busy, and you're pretty fucking busy with something or other pretty much all constantlike, as much as you can. You go out and you kill things and you bake them up good, and Nepeta teaches you how to make a troll-french braid while you're on stake-outs and how to weave a friendship collar out of grass and you try to teach her how to spin some purroper fresh rhymes in addition to the pie adventures, but her skills definitely lie in the field of being motherfucking adorabloodthirsty and not so much in beatmastery or crustlording. It's all chill, though.

It'S aLl, you think, carrying in a pronghorn-hoofbeast back to the chowlair, MoThErFuCkInG fInE.

Through the door to Equius's forge you can see everyone gathering, and the long silver shape of their sleeping beauty babe pulsing with blue and red and white light.

"hEY, iS iT tImE?" you ask, leaning through the door, catching yourself on the frame. "sHiIiIt..." The light spears into your thinkpan it's so bright and it burns and you feel small and strange and then it's over and Aradia II is floating gently to the ground like a leaf on the wind, beautiful and shining as stardust and her arms make a slender silver ring around your brother Equius's neck.

"HeYyYy," you say, but no one's looking.

"Thank y0u," the robot girl says, and brings her shining lips to your

TO YOUR MOTHERFUCKING

best beloved's  
 _  
MOUTH._

"MOTHERFUCKING HEY," you say, and _then_ everyone looks, even the girl. You drop the pronghorn's corpse to the floor. "WHAT THE MOTHERFUCK WAS THAT."

"Oh, ffffuck," Nepeta says somewhere beyond the indigo ragestage that's being drawn through the world, "Oh _ffft_ , everypurrson _get the ffuck out_."

"what the 2hiit--"

"gO GO _GO._ "

Equius spins the girl behind him with one hand and holds the other out to you, loose and empty as a dead thing and your club is in your own hand and smashing down and the dead girl screams like a bell and leaps for you, a blaze of silver light searing through you like a whip, tasting like all the emptiness you've grown up guzzling like motherfucking _milk_ and it does _nothing_. You're the king of slaughter and the lord of the void and the singer of a very special ultraviolet death for each and every single creature in the universe and nothing, nothing will stop you when you get your groove going. You swing your club again and miss and it's all dead white light and your friends screaming--

And then they're running, everyone scattering like sparks through the doors out to the night and gone and it's just your best blueblood sprawled on the floor, his hands clutching the ventilation you introduced to his forehead like he's upset, like there's a motherfucking _problem_ with the way you're conducting your business, like the two of you aren't ripping open a mad motherfucking bag of _understanding_ at this moment.

"i didn't know we were due for a reacharound any time soOn, bEst fRiEnD," you say, "I DIDN'T MOTHERFUCKING KNOW YOU WERE GETTING MOTHERFUCKING _TIRED_ OF MY BAD MOTHERFUCKING SELF, MOTHERFUCKER."

"It wasn't--" Equius stammers, his shades knocked away and his eyes wide as cruel suns, "Gamzee, she did not mean-- we aren't-"

And it's like you'd be okay with it you guess but there's this thing. This kind of thing that you and your most bitching motherfucker have square between you as a thing what's gotten particularly acknowledged and it's just... your _thing_.

And the thing is that you have a hole in your think-pan, burned round as a star at the very very back and the hole goes down and down and down into the rest of you, that endless silent nothing that you contain within yourself and sometimes when your head's all empty that darkness comes back up and looks right through that hole in your pan and it speaks with the voice of the spaces between the stars.

It's talking right now.

"no problem, man," you say, "NO MOTHERFUCKING PROBLEM, MY BROTHER," you say, "if you'd wanted to shake things up a little YOU SHOULD HAVE MOTHERFUCKING SAID SO."

"Gamzee, I implore you to listen to me--"

"IF YOU'D WANTED SOME MOTHERFUCKING BLACK ROMANCE UP IN THIS BITCH YOU SHOULD HAVE MOTHERFUCKING JUST TOLD ME, BITCHTITS," you say. You're being perfectly reasonable, but he's backing away from you like a scuttlebeast, like prey, shaking his head like _no no no_ and really actually it's _MOTHERFUCKING YES._ You grab his throat and bear him down to the floor underneath you and he's so warm, so hard beneath your thighs as you straddle his chest and his pulse is like the flap of an old unpegged tent in a storm as it beats against your hands as you bear down and down and _down._

"Please!" he mouths silently, fangs flashing in the dim light as he mouths for all the air you're not letting in. His chest bucks up and his legs make rough noises against the rotten floor like a forgotten language as you grind yourself against him, responding sweet as a marionette made just for you. His hands are around your wrists like vices, crushing into your skin and the pain burns all the way through you one way and hits the pleasure coming up the other way, so sweet and hot and you spill yourselves across the floor like animals, screaming into the night. After you've caught your breath, you bend down and lick at the blue tears running down his cheeks.

He tastes of the ocean, even this far inland in this strange muggy little plainshive, and it calms you down just a tick, just enough to notice his pulse fluttering to a stop, his chest slumped down like the roof of an abandoned hive, wrecked into nothingness. Those monstrous hands of his release yours, falling empty and away.

You let go, aching and sticky and suddenly very, very scared.

"Oh GoDs," you say, sitting back, scrambling off his slack body. "oH gOd Oh GoD oH gOd."

You remember a beach and a different time and the feel of your brother pressing something down into your lungs besides sea-salt emptiness, a breath from him to you and you think _mIracLes_ and you think _PLeaSe no, pLEase No_. You bring your hands to his empty chest and your lips to his slack snaggle-fang mouth and you breathe out and think _NO._

He breathes in, and it is like every moonrise in your whole life all at once, the relief thick enough to bite off and bake. He breathes in and then out and then in and then coughs, deep and wet and pained.

"Gamzee,"  he wheezes, coughing like he's going to break, staring up at you with those eyes of his wide-open as broken windows, "please-- _please_ \--"

"he left me," you say, holding your hands out, warning him-- away, off, something, the words rising up in a bitter tidalwave through your gut and out your mouth, "he was never ever fucking home and I LOVED HIM SO FUCKING MUCH BuT hE nEvEr CAME aNd tHen he just DIED SOMEWHERE oUt iN the ocean and i knew he was fucking old and i knew he never really cared much but thought he would at least say _goodbye_ to me before he went for real and he just had to go and wash up on the fucking shore like thAt, LIKE IT WAS NOTHING, lIkE hE wAs nOtHiNg, LIKE I WAS NOTHINGaNd i Don't even remember his MOTHERFUCKING NAME aNd I dOn't actually know if i ever fucking knew it at all..."

Something warm streaks down your cheek, splashes down on your hands, a drop of thin indigo.

"what thE fuCk," you say, reaching up and feeling at your face, "wHaT THE MOTHERFUCK?" smearing white and gray and indigo on to your fingers and it doesn't stop, this liquid burn from somewhere behind your eyes, tasting of the ocean, tasting of pain.

"EqUiUs...?" You ask, and then he's reaching up to you and his heavy, shaking arms are around your shoulders and you're sobbing, miserable dark waves of emotion spinning out of somewhere you didn't know you had and pouring themselves down the outside of your face, rattling you like an empty tin tossed by a storm. You dig your fingers into his bloodspattered shit and you hang on, shaking and helpless in the face of this horrible new thing that's happening to you.

"i"Ll tAkE tHiS aS bLaCk As YoU fUcKiNg WaNnA gO, mOtHeRfUcKeR," you say, your voice crushed all to pieces, "JuSt DoN't yOu DaRe LeAvE mE, bRoThEr. DoN't YoU dArE fUcKiNg lEt mE gO."

"Beloved," he breathes out, a sigh, a song, a motherfucking prayer, "Gamzee. Gamzee, you will have me as your truest love for as long as you desire me."

His lips against your forehead are as gentle as the brush of a mountain against the sky. You close your eyes and believe in miracles as hard as you can.

*

The imperial drones have come gone. You'd filled your redpail and when they wanted to know who your kismesis was you'd looked them up and down told them "anyone that geTs In My MoTHERFUCKING WAY," and the blackbucket brother had tested your genetic material and you guess it had believed you, so here you are, nine sweeps old and ready to touch the stars.

You and your dead-red stone cold brother Equius are going to motherfucking touch some fucking stars: put them all out, one by one by one, a blaze of black-rainbow slaughter spreading across the universe. You have told him your plan, in the dead of the day when the sun pours in deathly bright the windows and sets the prickles of his sweat to shining diamonds and he had trembled under your hand, arched up into the darkness inside your skin and agreed yes, yes, anything, highblood, we'll snuff out every star, bring the whole universe to its knees in the glorious cold silence--

He's so, so good to you.

Now he stands at the edge of your beach, this first and final ocean of your childhood, one foot on sand and one foot on the edge of the gangway of your ship: yours and yours and _his_ , all slick slippery gunmetal gray, as elegant and lethal as your lovebrother.

"Does it satisfy you, my highb100d?" he asks, and some part of him is still that flighty broad-shouldered boy that you held down and asked about pails two sweeps ago and the rest of him is bigger.

Better.

"iT's nIcE," you say, walking through the daywarm sand towards your starship, spinning out your captchalogue cards in a blaze of greenbluepurple face-melting majesty, a wild swarm of miracle modii unfolding like magic flowers out of nowhere to fuse indellibly with the fabric of space and time and your ship, your motherfucking Capricorn, and she gives a throaty engine whine like the deathscream of a thousand thousand horns trod under one mighty hoof as she tithes her command over to you. You look up at the endless sky and through the hole rusted clear through your brain the black rage inside of you looks up too, and nothing, absolutely _nothing_ looks back.

"are you ready for the dark carnival, my best beloved?" you ask the man at your side.

He takes your hand. In the cracked lenses of his shades and the salty pinprickles across his skin are reflected the glorious colors of your finest miracle. And then he smiles.

"RIGHT ANSWER, MOTHERFUCKER," you tell him, and you set your bare foot, sandwarm, on the wild rainbow riot of your destiny.


End file.
